Session 5 | whiteboard

Improving your Grammar when Writing Reports

Many in the teaching industry think that the traditional way of teaching grammar is not very effective. Instead, professionals - including Scott Thornbury - suggest that helping students 'notice' grammars rules, and new vocabulary in a text is the way forward. You can read more about 'noticing' here:

Noticing.

Scott Thornbury discusses many different strategies to help you 'notice' grammar and vocabulary. We tried three of these strategies in our last session. The text I am using today is a fake report I wrote for a student called Andrew. You can find the full text at the bottom of the page. The first strategy is DICTOGLOSS. Let's try it again.

get a pencil and paper;
put your pencil down - DON'T touch it!
press play and listen to the recording below;
when the recording is finished, pick up your pencil and write what you heard;
repeat 5 times.

After you have written your paragraph, it is best to work with a partner to reconstruct the paragraph together. Then, listen and check.

The next strategy, I like to call 'Slash and Trash'. You can see some worksheets for this technique by clicking here. Have a look at the next paragraph from Andrew's school report, and see the 'key meaning words' listed below:

Biology / Andrew / progress / classifying living things / requirements / function / needs / explain / learned / diagrams / vertebrae animals / habitat / differentiate / living / non-living things

do not look at the original text;
on your paper, write down the 'key meaning words' above;
use the key meaning words to reconstruct the original text, focusing on meaning;
when you think you have written the paragraph correctly, check it against the original text and see if there are differences;
finally, if there are differences, do they change the meaning of the text?

Now, read the next paragraph of Andrew's report.

write down the key meaning words on a piece of paper;
reconstruct the text from these words;
check your text against the original;
Does the meaning of your text match the original?

Finally, you can improve your grammar by Self-correction; learning to notice your own errors when you proof-read. Here is a picture of the whiteboard from our last session. You identified your usual errors:

Here is the rest of Andrew's report (click the button below). Find the error in each line (one line has no errors!) The first 8 lines have an 'error code'; please refer to the key to find the type of error.

You can read the full text of Andrew's report by clicking the button below:

Find the errors in the rest of Andrew's report

Andrew's report: full text